Productivity Planner — The Productive Way to Productivity Planning

Productivity plays a big part in many peoples lives, and being productive is something we all want to achieve. After all, you can’t beat that warm fuzzy feeling inside when you feel like you’ve really achieved something major.

Productivity and planning have always been a great focus for me, but with so many different methods and tools it can all become rather unproductive. Prioritising can become an absolute nightmare, with time getting pulled to low importance tasks that don’t generate results.

Introducing The Productivity Planner

The Productivity Planner is an extremely useful (and beautiful) journal created by the guys over at Intelligent Change, Inc. The planner has one goal, to make you productive and accountable.

Accountability is something myself and my business partner Oliver harp on about a lot. We find that the key way to really motivate yourself to achieve goals and action crunch tasks is to make yourself accountable.

The Productivity Planner is a great way to do this.

The journal is organised into weekly planning blocks, with space to plan the most important tasks for the week, followed by daily sub tasks and then a weekly review.

What’s in the planner?

The planner starts off with a few chapters explaining the concept of the planner, hints and tips for better productivity and then a guide to using the Productivity Planner.

It’s an extremely inspirational section to get your mind primed for using the planner. Some of the tips included cover prioritisation, things to do, things to avoid and how to write meaningful tasks so that they are achievable and measurable.

Motivational quotes span throughout the pages, keeping you in check.

There is a section that covers time tracking and includes how to track your time and make the most of breaks, which can be extremely useful once you get down to your daily planning and task implementation.

The journal also has many motivational quotes placed throughout, including one per day on the daily planning pages!

You WILL be accountable!

When you first get started with the planner, you are able to fill out your ‘commitment’. This commitment is an in-genius method employed by the crew over at Intelligent Change to implant congruence and accountability within your mind.

Once you’ve followed the statement, set your goals and committed to the cause it becomes the number one priority to keep your promise to yourself!

Weekly Planning

To get you started on your way to becoming a productivity extraordinaire, each week starts with a weekly planning page.

As with the rest of the journal, this page focuses on selecting a limited number of your most important tasks to achieve for the week. It’s broken down into 4 sections, which without realising makes you instantly start prioritising what you have in your mind.

Daily Planning

From here, you’re on to your daily plans which can be completed as the last thing you do each day for the following day or as the first thing you carry out that morning.

I personally prefer doing this on the morning as I’m an early riser and have had time to sleep on any major decisions and then prioritise with no distractions.

In keeping with the prioritisation theme, you are made to select your SINGLE most important task of the day, followed by any secondary or additional tasks.

You can then track your time taken on the task using the Pomodoro method, allocating a target time (based on 25 minute slots) and noting how long it actually took.

Weekly Review

This is where the honesty and accountability comes into play! I have found the weekly review section to be an extremely useful tool in identifying any major flaws in my working patterns.

At the end of each week, there is a section that allows you to note what happened and how everything went. This allows you to review any major ‘wins’ for the week, anything that wasn’t completed (and why) and what you can do the following week to improve.

This is fundamental in keeping yourself accountable and is extremely useful to look back on the following week to ensure you’re not repeating any mistakes or productivity drains.

Becoming a Productivity Ninja

I’d personally say that the Productivity Planner has had a profound impact on my productivity and prioritisation.

Not only has it provided a single platform to be able to plan but also made me aware of what I’m doing and how I have been limiting my achievements.

I’ve been able to:

Easily map out priority tasks

Disregard the tasks that don’t match my key results areas

Realise and benchmark just how long particular tasks take me

Stay focussed and driven towards an end goal due to accountability

There seems to be something motivating about being able to fill out the review page in a positive manner.

Since using the planner, I have become less wrapped up in the non-essentials and have reworked some of the services I use to limit distracting notifications as I realised this is where I was losing a lot of time, jumping into reactive mode as soon as I was alerted to something.

I’d highly recommend the Productivity Planner to any business owner looking to take control and start achieving maximum efficiency!

Have you used the Productivity Planner? Share your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to press the ‘heart’ if you enjoyed reading.